Posts Tagged 'Earth'

I’m pretty sure that many people have trouble understanding stellar distances. Even Mars, one of the closest planets, is really far away by Earthly measurement standards. Check out this great and simple web animation on how far away Mars actually is from Earth.

The floor of the ocean is home to 2.9×1029 single-celled organisms but this large number, 10 million trillion microbes for every human on planet Earth, is only 8% of the previous estimate of 35.5×1029. Jens Kallmeyer, a geomicrobiologist and his colleagues at the University of Potsdam in Germany have created the most accurate model of the geographical distribution of microbes in the marine sediment. They published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Canadian scientists Felix Pharand-Deschenes used satellite images to map the human influence on Earth, depicting how much it has changed, as seen from space. Pharand-Deschenes used data collected by various government agencies to create these striking images.

Powerful magnetic disturbances in Sol’s corona have hurled a large burst of charged particles into space on March 4th. The solar storm erupted from the sunspot AR 1429 at 11:13PM and according to NASA, it should hit Earth on Tuesday night and Wednesday.

According to some calculations, the Earth is losing 50,000 tonnes of mass every single year, even though an extra 40,000 tonnes of space dust converge onto the Earth’s gravity well, it’s still losing weight.

The increase in solar activity has become quite obvious on Earth, thanks to the increase in auroras caused by geomagnetic storms, but while astronomers had previously believed that the Earth might be stripped temporarily of its radiation belts, causing the charged electrons to inundate the atmosphere, new data has shown that the deadly particles will actually be blown back into space.

An asteroid about the size of a bus shaved by Earth in what’s been described as a near miss. However, experts weren’t concerned that it might have impacted. This isn’t uncommon and these types of asteroids are hard to see except when they come quite close to Earth.